White Crocodile (3 page)

Luke had come into the kitchen one morning last summer, mud from his boots flaking on to the lino, smiling, self-conscious, contrite.

‘I’ve got something for you.’

She had tried to smile back then, reading his mood. Her mouth still tasted of blood and her lips felt puffy and lopsided. But it was easier to move on, pretend nothing had happened. Her brain processed quickly, running through a range of low-risk answers, stopping to select, like a sixties jukebox picking records.

‘A present?’ she murmured, aware that her thick lip was making her slur a little, hating herself for it. ‘Diamonds, maybe?’

He smiled and stepped towards her and automatically her back went rigid, her pulse rose a few notches. He sensed the change and hurt flashed in his eyes. But the walk had calmed him and he was obviously determined not to spoil the moment; his voice didn’t falter. ‘Close your eyes and hold out your hand.’

She watched through the crack of her eyelids as something soft fell into the palm of her hand. ‘What is that?’

‘A sock. A baby girl’s sock.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘I found it on Salisbury Plain. Lying on the ground.’

‘And you just picked it up?’

He shrugged and grinned, relaxing into the moment, conscious now that she was going to let him move on, pretend his outburst an hour ago had never happened.

‘It’s a good omen. I know it is. It’s going to happen, soon.’ He smiled, his eyes growing warm again. ‘It’s what I want . . . what we
both
want, isn’t it?’

Tess forced a smile of acquiescence, her heart fluttering in her chest. ‘It’s filthy. And you’re nuts,’ she whispered, regretting it immediately.

‘Of that,’ Luke said, with a tiny smile, ‘there is no doubt. But you’re crazy too, Tess. That’s why we love each other so much.’

Tess shivered. ‘I’m throwing it away.’

But for some reason, she hadn’t. She’d made up some excuse about having to get dinner on, to get away from him, and left it on the hall table. When she had remembered and come back, it had disappeared. He had taken it.

The next time she had seen the tiny pink sock was in a battered envelope with a Cambodian stamp on it, which had landed on her doormat a month after Luke was dead and buried.

The address was typed, and there was nothing else on the packet to betray who had sent it, and nothing else inside. She had turned the envelope upside down, and shoved her hand right up inside to make sure. Luke had gone to Cambodia as a single man, knowing their marriage was over, that she had finally found the guts to leave him. Who there knew about her? Who cared?

And then she had noticed, on the other side of the envelope from its stamp and postmark, a tiny scribble. It had meant nothing to her at the time: a doodle of a reptile, like a pictogram, so small that she couldn’t even tell exactly what it was supposed to be. A gecko? A lizard?

The sock was here now, on the coffee table in the centre of her room in the boarding house. She bent and curled her fingers around it.

The room was large and airy, with a small kitchen and white tiled bathroom leading off it, on the first floor of a two-storey new build, set back from the road in a walled garden, and overlooked by a jostling crowd of palms. The walls were white-painted and bare: she had nothing personal to hang up, and the floor, bed and sofa were clear of scattered belongings.

She had forgotten to close the balcony doors when she had left in the morning. Orange light streamed through the glass, casting twin rectangles on the floorboards. There was a puddle of rainwater on the wooden floor and the bottoms of the white curtains were opaque with damp. Beyond them the sun was sinking.

‘I know I shouldn’t be calling,’ Luke had said, the first time he telephoned from Cambodia. ‘I know we agreed. But I wanted to speak to you. That’s OK, isn’t it? Just sometimes? You know that I don’t have anyone else.’

She had been on the verge of telling him that he didn’t have
her
any more either, but now that he was on the line it felt petty, vengeful. She had assumed, after all that he had done to her, that her anger would never subside. That she would be able to close him off – be rational and emotionless in their dealings. But the reality was far less binary. There was history and memory. Love – gone now – but more intense than she had felt for anyone else, ever.

He had been so self-contained the first time they had met, at a summer ball in the officers’ mess four years ago. She had noticed him immediately: something to do with his height perhaps. He was half a head taller than most of the other men in the room, and well built, not in a body builder’s way, but loose and athletic. He had sandy blond hair, cut short, and the palest blue-grey eyes she had ever seen, the colour of a clear winter sky. But, attractive as he was, his physical features weren’t the main reason she had noticed him. He was standing alone, and what drew her to him was how comfortable he was in his self-containment, surrounded as he was by a heaving mass of drunken extroverts. She had seen a reflection of herself in him. That same distance, that same separation she felt from other people. The image she retained of their meeting brought to mind the Robert Doisneau photograph of lovers kissing, freeze-framed against the blur of a busy Paris street.

She had felt a fierce love for him virtually from the moment they met. She realised, soon after they were married, that the love she felt had blinded her to the reality of his personality. Controlling behaviour had seemed protective; overly intense and uncompromising behaviour, adoration and concern; introversion and suspicion of others, mysteriousness. As the only child of a single father overwhelmed by his parenting responsibilities, who had farmed her care out to friends and an ever-changing roll call of nannies, she wasn’t used to being the centre of someone else’s world, and that feeling had been intoxicating.

Now she just felt exhausted by it all, empty.

Why did it matter if he called her? She was never going back to him. Distance protected her, made her strong enough to resist. She could speak to him without being sucked back into that same old pattern of needy love, violence, guilt and apology. She placed a hand against the flat of her stomach.

‘It’s fine, Luke.’

He was managing a troop of thirty Khmer clearers, teaching them Western military disciplines so that, in time, they would become skilled enough to be self-sufficient. He sounded softer, more relaxed than she’d known him in a long time, and she felt relieved that he had found a life beyond her that might make him happy. But a couple of months after he arrived, his tone began to change.

‘It’s different when you get under the surface,’ he said one time, his voice rising against the static crackle on the line. ‘You start to see the other side.’

‘What do you mean? What other side?’

‘You remember when you called me outside because there was a cat in the garden? What, two summers ago?’ She was baffled by the non sequitur, and then a burst of interference and the faint words of someone else, another conversation, crossed the line.

‘Luke, I can’t hear you.’ The memory came into focus though. A stray cat hanging around in the back garden one morning. When they’d approached it, they’d seen the fur on one flank stirring, the pale, bloated bodies of maggots. It watched them with unperturbed green eyes; leapt the fence when Tess had tried to tempt it close enough to catch with a saucer of milk.

She heard a sigh, pixellated by the crackle. He was talking about the UN brokering peace after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. ‘They did it, sure. But at the same time they screwed around, didn’t bother to use condoms and kickstarted AIDS. They were out here to help, for fuck’s sake. Like that cat. Perfect one side – then you see the other, the hidden side.’

She drew a long breath, closed her eyes. ‘But that was almost thirty years ago, Luke?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘Cambodia has an AIDS epidemic, now. So they’ve not just got the mine problem they started with, they’ve got an AIDS problem too, caused by the bastards who were supposed to be helping.’ She heard the familiar anger rising in his voice, and shivered despite herself. ‘And that attitude, that disregard for people’s rights, for their
lives
, it pervades everything out here. Khmers have a weird fatalism.’

The tone of his voice, slightly distorted by the distance, made her skin tingle. Sliding the chair back from the desk, clutching the receiver to her ear, she had moved over to the window, stared over the endless green of Salisbury Plain. A man and his dog appeared over the brow of a distant hill; a pair of buzzards circled; the white wisps of a jet engine’s contrail streamed across a cloudless sky. Everything felt so normal, so dull and predictable and achingly safe, that she just wasn’t able to go there, to push her mind to the place where Luke was. Wasn’t sure that she even wanted to.

It was when he called the following week that she realised he was frightened.

A few weeks later, he was dead. And she had known, in that instinctive, organic way that someone so familiar with another person knows, that, despite what she had been told, his death couldn’t have been an accident. He was too controlling for that. Too
good
. One of the best mine clearers that the army had ever seen, precisely because he was so controlled and precise,
every single time.

And now Johnny. Another army-trained, experienced mine clearer, in the same minefield, just a few months later.

A coincidence? No. She didn’t believe in coincidences.

From Rose Hill woods, Detective Inspector Andy Wessex watched the sun edge up into the sky beyond the M60, the light glancing off the windscreens of cars speeding southeast. It reminded him of Morse code exercises he used to play as a boy: his older brother hiding in the branches of the copper beech at the foot of the garden, him leaning out of their bedroom window flashing a torch to signal. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot. Save Our Souls. The imaginary enemy massed below them on the dark lawn.

Rose Hill was an offbeat description for this parallelogram of scrappy woodland jammed between two motorways, this one and the M56, the hum of traffic a reminder – even cocooned in the trees as Wessex was – that it was slap bang in the middle of south Manchester, surrounded by industrial estates and a spider’s web of terraced streets. The wood was predominantly conifer, with some ancient oaks scattered amongst the evergreens, their remaining leaves curled and yellow.

‘Morning, sir.’ Detective Sergeant Harriet Viles joined him, rubbing her hands together and shivering.

He stifled a yawn. ‘I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet.’

‘That bad?’

Andy tapped a finger on his nose. ‘Looks like something’s had a nibble.’

‘Just what I wanted to hear. Teach me to nip into the service station for a bacon sarnie on the way here.’

‘You’ve got a cast-iron stomach, Viles.’

They had to stop talking while an aeroplane roared overhead, its wheels lowered for landing at Manchester City Airport, just a few miles south; so low that Andy felt he could stretch his fingertips up and touch its shimmering underbelly.

‘Be a bugger to live around here,’ Viles said. She lived in a tiny house in Saddleworth, in the Pennines, with her girlfriend and six rescue cats. Wessex had been there once when they’d first started working together last year, to collect her when her car had failed to start. She’d invited him in for a coffee to meet Serena, but he’d had to leave after five minutes because he’d broken out in a rash from the cat hair on the sofa. Back in his spotless warehouse apartment, sandwiched between bankers and lawyers, as central as he could afford without living with the tramps in the city station, he shuddered to think about the mess in that house.

‘So what have we got, sir?’

‘Young female, teenager or early twenties, Pakistani or Indian most likely, though it’s hard to tell without an autopsy. Been here a few days from the look of her.’

‘Who found her?’

‘Dog walker.’

‘Ah. Who’d be a dog walker? As I’ve always said, cats are the way forward. Just remember that when you finally cave in and get yourself some live-in company for those lonely weekends.’

He clapped a hand on her shoulder. ‘I crave lonely weekends. Come on. Let’s take a look at the crime scene, and then I’d like you to drive the dog walker back to the station and get a proper statement from him.’ Wessex inclined his head towards the command vehicle, where an elderly man in a tweed coat and hat stood holding the lead of an overweight brindle Staffordshire bull terrier.

‘Fine. Who is he?’

‘Name’s Derek Taylor. He runs a printing company out of a unit in Sharston industrial estate. He said he comes here every morning to walk the dog before work.’

They moved slowly through the slippery, rotting leaf mulch, towards the forensic team who looked like forest ghouls gliding through the trees in their white plastic overalls. As they went deeper into the trees the hum of cars on the M60 faded. A roar and another aeroplane flew overhead, landing lights washing them white as it passed.

‘How did he find her?’

‘The dog ran off, wouldn’t come back when he called. She’s quite old, the man said, and pretty obedient.’ Andy stretched and rubbed a hand across his stubble. ‘But greedy. When she wouldn’t come back, he followed the dog’s tracks and found her pulling at something. The body was partially covered in fallen leaves, so he took a moment to realise what it was. I don’t think the image will be leaving him for a while.’

They moved over to the edge of the police tape that a couple of uniforms were stringing between the trees to fence off the crime scene, and Wessex pointed.

‘There. See her? Lying on her back.’

‘No, I can’t see her.’

‘Just the torso is visible. Her bottom half is covered in leaves, that orangey-brown mound.’

He shifted closer, so that she could peer down the length of his arm.

‘The oak. See the oak. Follow the trunk down, and she’s a couple of yards to the right of that.’

‘OK, I . . .’ She put a hand over her mouth. ‘Fuck.’

‘Yes. Not the most pleasant.’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘And just for the record, the puke’s the dog walker’s, not mine.’